Free Republic

>BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, a friend of this program passed away, William Raspberry. He was a longtime columnist for the Washington Post. He passed away at age 76, and he's survived by his mother, who is 104. He also has a couple kids and his wife of 45 years. But he's survived by his mother, 104 years old. William Raspberry in 1993, very famous columnist for the Washington Post and very famous, highly respected liberal, he was one of the last of the breed of liberals that could still be reasoned with. You can't reason with liberals....

Former Washington Post columnist William Raspberry has passed away. The obituaries in both the Post and the New York Times noted that while Raspberry was generally considered a liberal, he often expressed opinions that defied easy labels. Perhaps the most famous such case of an unconventional Raspberry column, which neither newspaper mentioned, was when he publicly changed his opinion of Rush Limbaugh after listening to his program. This was described through the years by Limbaugh as the Raspberry Effect: The Raspberry Effect, William Raspberry, a former columnist of the Washington Post, he wrote a piece highly critical of me based...

William Raspberry, a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist for The Washington Post who for 39 years in more than 200 newspapers brought a moderate voice to social issues, including race relations — sometimes to the ire of civil rights leaders — died on Tuesday at his home in Washington. He was 76.

After Four Decades as a Columnist, It's Time for Baby Steps So, what's next? I've been wrestling with the question, in one form or another, ever since I decided that the end of this year would be the end of my 39 years as a newspaper columnist. For years I've had two nightmare scenarios. In the first, I'm sitting in a wheelchair on the deck of a luxury cruise ship, wearing a lap robe against the chill -- and wondering where the devil I am. That is to say, I've feared that after reaching the point where I have the...

<p>May 15, 2003 -- ONE of the advantages of being around for a while is that no matter what happens, you've seen something like it before. I've seen something like Jayson Blair, the reporter for The New York Times who deeply embarrassed his employer by manufacturing or stealing information that he passed off as original work - and who, by getting away with it so long, earned himself a place in journalism textbooks for decades to come.</p>

I love courtroom dramas. Maybe that's why I keep going back to that February day when Colin Powell, as powerfully persuasive as any district attorney ever was, put on that famous multimedia production that convinced me — convinced America — that Saddam Hussein really was developing (and hiding) weapons of mass destruction. Here, the secretary of state was telling the jury masquerading as the U.N. Security Council, you see the chemical and biological labs at one of the production sites. And here, you notice the trucks are gone — just hours before the U.N. inspectors are due on the scene....

The White House says it with sorrow. The Israeli prime minister says it with impressive determination. Pundits say it as though it is stone-carved truth. We must not reward terrorism -- by demolishing the West Bank settlements, by negotiating with Yasser Arafat (or even accepting the legitimacy of his leadership), by withdrawing Israeli troops from Palestinian territory or, above all, by seriously pushing for Palestinian statehood. The admonition is repeated as though its meaning is crystal clear. But what, in fact, does it mean?

<p>Bill O'Reilly of "The O'Reilly Factor" is one of the few major media figures who does not hesitate to criticize Jesse Jackson, so it was appropriate that the author of a critical new book about Mr. Jackson appeared on that program. The book is aptly titled "Shakedown," in honor of the Rev. Jackson's success in extracting millions of dollars from weak-kneed corporations that are fearful of his calling them "racist."</p>